City Council to evaluate Ruiz

Christian Hill @RGchill

Sunday

Jun 25, 2017 at 12:01 AM

After skipping the task last year, Eugene’s elected leaders will evaluate City Manager Jon Ruiz on Wednesday.

Ruiz’s employment contract says the City Council intends to evaluate the city manager every year. But the council didn’t do that last year — the first time in Ruiz’s tenure it didn’t give him an annual performance evaluation.

Several city councilors didn’t return messages from The Register-Guard seeking comment on why they skipped the evaluation last year.

Asked earlier this year, city spokeswoman Jan Bohman said there wasn’t “one particular reason” why the council opted against an evaluation last year.

“It was a combination of a very full council calendar of pressing business, an upcoming change in mayor/council composition, and it just became a lower priority,” she said in an email.

But even without the evaluation, the city still raised Ruiz’s salary last year, bumping his base pay by 2.6 percent, to $212,825 from $207,357.

Ruiz’s total compensation in 2016, including all benefits and city contributions to the state’s public pension system, was $238,613, according to the city.

His employment contract requires Ruiz to receive a cost-of-living raise, based on the consumer price index, every year at the same percentage as that which Ruiz awards to city staff who are not represented by labor unions.

The consumer price index in Portland for all items increased 2.6 percent to the second half of 2016 from the second half of 2015, the city said.

Ruiz and other so-called “exempt” employees who are not covered by labor union contracts, including department directors, are eligible for another cost-of-living increase this year. Bohman said Ruiz has not yet made “any announcement about an exempt COLA.”

Under his contract, the council can give Ruiz a separate annual merit pay increase of up to 5 percent of his base salary depending on how he scores in his performance evaluation.

Ruiz didn’t receive a merit pay increase last year, because the council didn’t evaluate him.

Ruiz has been Eugene’s city manager since April 2008. His base salary when hired was $162,150. From then through last year, the council has boosted his pay 31 percent.

The council has routinely given Ruiz glowing reviews. In many of his prior reviews, Ruiz declined his merit pay hike, but accepted the cost of living increase. In 2012, he donated his nearly $8,700 merit pay raise to the foundation that supports the Eugene Public Library.

They are scheduled to evaluate Ruiz during both a public meeting and an executive, or nonpublic, session.

State law allows the governing boards of public agencies to discuss the job performance of a chief executive officer behind closed doors. The governing board must make any decisions, including pay increases, during a public meeting.

Although Ruiz’s contract says the City Council “intends to review and evaluate Ruiz’s performance and salary annually, generally in April,” the elected leaders typically conduct them in June and July.

Under Eugene’s council-manager form of government, the eight elected city councilors set policy for the city and hire a full-time city manager to run the daily operations of the municipal government.

The city has about 1,500 full-time-equivalent employees and a total annual budget of more than a half-billion dollars.